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The series Genocide and Mass Violence in the Age of Extremes wants to provide an interdisciplinary forum for research on mass violence and genocide during the "short" 20th century. It will highlight the role of state and non-state actors, the perspectives of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders, and put violent events of the Age of Extremes in a larger political, social, and most important, cultural context. Anthologies and monographs will provide academic and non-academic readers with a deep insight into and a better understanding for the reasons, the acts, and the consequences or mass violence and genocide from a global perspective. Titles of the series will be published in print and OPEN ACCESS. Advisory Board: Omer Bartov (Brown University) Wolfgang Benz (TU Berlin) Elissa Bemporad (Queens College, CUNY) Nida Kirmani (LUMS, Pakistan) Thomas Kühne (Clark University) Michael Pfeifer (John and Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY) Jürgen Zimmerer (University of Hamburg)
To prepare for the role of the Joker, Heath Ledger locked himself in a London hotel room, trying to understand and become a character he saw as “an absolute sociopath, a cold-blooded, mass-murdering clown” who was not intimidated by anything and found all of life “a big joke.” In the end, Ledger’s obsession with his role contributed to his own death from drugs before The Dark Knight was released. The connections and irony are too close to ignore. The movie gives the world a curious twist on the roles of Batman and the Joker. It’s politically incorrect, and yet emotionally the Joker’s insanity becomes more endearing than Batman’s noble sacrifice. What is it? Why does this psyc...
On the morning after Kristallnacht, Toby Sonneman’s father walked through broken glass to apply for the visa that saved him from the fate of so many during the Third Reich. In examining her own family history, the author discovered the similarities between the fate of the Jews and the Gypsies in the Holocaust, both peoples selected on racial grounds for extermination by the Nazis. She traveled with an American Gypsy survivor to Munich, where she stayed with the formidable Rosa Mettbach. This is the story of Rosa and other members of an extended family who survived the Holocaust. Shared Sorrows tells the story of a Gypsy family against the backdrop of a Jewish one, detailing and examining t...
Winner of the National Jewish Book Award: “This valuable resource covers an aspect of the Holocaust rarely addressed and never in such detail.” —Library Journal This is the first volume in a monumental seven-volume encyclopedia, reflecting years of work by the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which will describe the universe of camps and ghettos—many thousands more than previously known—that the Nazis and their allies operated, from Norway to North Africa and from France to Russia. For the first time, a single reference work will provide detailed information on each individual site. This first volu...
The A to Z of the Gypsies (Romanies) seeks to end such prejudice by clarifying the facts about this nomadic people. Through a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on significant persons, places, events, institutions, and aspects of culture, society, economy, and politics, the history of the Gypsies and their culture is told.
General Motors, the largest corporation on earth today, has been the owner since 1929 of Adam Opel AG, Russelsheim, the maker of Opel cars. Ford Motor Company in 1931 built the Ford Werke factory in Cologne, now the headquarters of European Ford. In this book, historians tell the astonishing story of what happened at Opel and Ford Werke under the Third Reich, and of the aftermath today. Long before the Second World War, key American executives at Ford and General Motors were eager to do business with Nazi Germany. Ford Werke and Opel became indispensable suppliers to the German armed forces, together providing most of the trucks that later motorized the Nazi attempt to conquer Europe. After ...
Roaming the countryside in caravans, earning their living as musicians, peddlers, and fortune-tellers, the Gypsies and their elusive way of life represented an affront to Nazi ideas of social order, hard work, and racial purity. They were branded as "asocials," harassed, and eventually herded into concentration camps where many thousands were killed. But until now the story of their persecution has either been overlooked or distorted. In The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies, Guenter Lewy draws upon thousands of documents--many never before used--from German and Austrian archives to provide the most comprehensive and accurate study available of the fate of the Gypsies under the Nazi regime. Le...
The program of extermination Nazis called the Final Solution took the lives of approximately six million Jews, amounting to roughly 60 percent of European Jewry and a third of the world’s Jewish population. Studying the Holocaust from a sociological perspective, Ronald J. Berger explains why the Final Solution happened to a particular people for particular reasons; why the Jews were, for the Nazis, the central enemy. Taking a unique approach in its examination of the devastating event, The Holocaust, Religion, and the Politics of Collective Memory fuses history and sociology in its study of the Holocaust. Berger’s book illuminates the Holocaust as a social construction. As historical sch...
This book chronicles the escapes attempted by Belgian soldiers and civilians from Nazi-occupied Europe during the Second World War. Insofar as is practical, the authors have tried to let the subjects speak for themselves by making extensive use of their testimonies preserved in archives in Belgium and the United Kingdom. The book begins with the stories of soldiers who managed to evade capture in the summer of 1940 and returned home, and the few that decided to continue the fight and joined the Allied forces in the United Kingdom. It also includes the prisoners of war who managed to escape from camps or Arbeitskommando inside the Reich and provides a detailed analysis of their narratives: th...
This book is the first major study of the blackout in the Second World War. Developing a comparative history of this system of civil defense in Britain and Germany, it begins by exploring how the blackout was planned for in both countries, and how the threat of aerial bombing framed its development. It then examines how well the blackout was adhered to, paying particular regard to the tension between its military value and the difficulties it caused civilians. The book then moves on to discuss how the blackout undermined the perception of security on the home front, especially for women. The final chapter examines the impact of the blackout on industry and transport. Arguing that the blackout formed an integral part in mobilising and legitimating British and German wartime discourses of community, fairness and morality, the book explores its profound impact on both countries.